Re:Fuchsia OS Introduction
by imtringued on Tuesday March 26, 2019 @07:20AM
(#19490724)
ARM and the SoC Vendors don't like open sourcing their drivers. They prefer to just dump binary blobs and stop support after 2 years. The users couldn't care less because they buy a new phone anyway. (except me)
[ Parent
| on HN ]
If the OS and APIs were stable, nobody would ever need to update a driver unless they wanted a bug fix.
Even Windows has a hard time keeping their OS APIs stable. Drivers written for Vista didn't necessarily work on Windows 7 and so on. This is one of the reasons why Linux highly encourages open sourcing the things so that the driver code can be updated when an API needs to change.
> Drivers written for Vista didn't necessarily work on Windows 7
This is patently, provably FALSE[1]
MS goes out of their way to NOT to break APIs. My ancient ATI netbook can run Windows Vista graphics drivers on Win 10. MS only breaks driver API when massive kernel/underlying APIs demand it. ex. 98->NT, XP->Visa.
Now contrast that with Linux. Linux kernel devs are openly hostile to binary blob drivers so they make no attempt to preserve ABI stability. I've see this happen multiple times with ATI binary drivers in GNU/Linux and when I was running cyanogenmod on my phone.
[1] https://www.techadvisor.co.uk/how-to/windows/how-get-drivers...